Online shopping is fast exploding. Retailers are trying very hard than ever before to grab the attention of the customers in the online market place. If you are unable to spend on ads, never worry. Here are some proven ways to drive more traffic to your site than buying ads.

Go for referral marketing
Most buying decisions online are influenced by recommendations by their friends. Find ways to make customers to view reviews and recommendations on your products. Customers won through referrals can have more lifetime value.

Upsell
A lot of ecommerce stores are now resorting to upselling which is the most accessible selling avenue online. Even with your existing customer base, upselling can increase the sales by 4% in an average. In relation to your whole revenue system, it can significantly add up to the profits. Studies show that it is 68% more expensive to get new customers than upselling to the current customers.

Fine tune the content
Create your content with the value proposition in mind. More than just being the buzz word, it is going to bring in some uniqueness to your business. It is going to make a difference in how you reward the customers in a way far different from how other do. Since the visitors are most likely to spend not more than 15 minutes on your website, give them something attractive within these minutes that no one else can give them.

Observe your speed
The site speed is crucial to decide the traffic. If your site is taking more than 3 seconds to load, you are losing more than 50% of your customers. Studies show that more than 80% of the customers who are frustrated with the site loading speed will never come back to those sites.

Social proof is important
92% customers will trust a site only based on their peer’s recommendations and 70% people trust it being recommended by total strangers. Social proof is something that you must care for. Visible to the customers in the form of reviews, they can bring about more conversions.

Be mobile friendly
Over 60% of the customers are today purchasing something on their mobile devices. It is important to optimize your site for the mobile shoppers.

Make your site engaging and interesting
The customers visiting your page must be able to tell how you will solve their problems and address their requirements. Most customers go by the first impression to decide whether they will buy from a site. How you present your products is very important. Rather than presenting strenuous long lists of products, make the navigation sleek and user friendly. Intuitive sites will attract more visitors.

Forward abandoned cart emails
Visitors adding things to their carts and abandoning it at the last minute will be highly frustrating. Abandonment emails send out reminders about the abandoned cart and studies show us that over 30% of the carts abandoned are recovered again by the customers when prompted.

Promotional emails work wonders
Once you have taken enough pains to build a healthy subscriber list, you can test the environment by sending promotional emails. Promotional emails help build loyalty and keep the customers coming back to you for more purchases. Through promotional emails, you are sending a message to the loyal customers that they are the ones to be notified on anything new on your site and this makes them happy.

Keep the checkout process simple
Many customers might abandon their shopping carts when the checkout process is long, complicated and frustrating. Remove any unnecessary buttons, texts and navigation. Introduce a fast guest checkout. Bring some mobile-friendliness for checking out. Provide different payment options and tweak your processes a bit based on customer feedback.